CHAPTER XI
MADAME ROBINEAUwas tall, angular, thin-lipped and devout, and so far as she indulged in social intercourse, loved to mingle with other angular, thin-lipped and devout ladies who belonged to the same lay sisterhood. She dressed in unrelieved black and always wore on her bosom a bronze cross of threatening magnitude. She prayed in the Cathedral at inconvenient hours, and fasted as rigorously as her Confessor, Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup, himself. Monsieur l’Abbé regarded her as one of the most pious women in Chartres. No doubt she was.
But Félise, although a good Catholic in her very simple way, and anxious to win favour by observance of the rules of the solitary household, was wicked enough to wish that her aunt were not quite so pious. In religious matters a wide latitudinarianism prevailed at the Hôtel des Grottes. There, with a serene conscience, one could eat meat on Fridays and crack a mild joke at the expense of the good Saint Peter. But neither forbidden flesh nor jocularity on any subject, let alone on a saint’s minor foibles, mitigated the austerities of the perky, wind-swept little house at Chartres. No wonder, thought Félise, Aunt Clothilde had married off a regiment of daughters—four to be exact; it had been an easy matter; she herself would have married any caricature of a man rather than spend her life in an atmosphere so rarefied and so depressing. She pitied her cousins, although, according to her Aunt Clothilde’s pragmatical account, they were all doing splendidly and had innumerable babies. By the end of the first week of her visit, she consolidated an intense dislike to Chartres and everything in it, especially the Cathedral. Now, it may be thought that any one who can shake the fist of disapprobation at the Cathedral of Chartres, is beyond the pale of human sympathy. But when you are dragged relentlessly thither in the icy dark of every winter morning, and the bitter gloom of every winter evening, to say nothing of sporadic attendances during the daytime, you may be pardoned if your æsthetic perceptions are obscured by the sense of outrage inflicted on your personal comfort. To many generations of men the Cathedral has been a symbol of glories, revelations and eternities. In such slanting shafts of light, mystically hued, the Grail might have been made manifest, the Sacred Dove might have glided down to the Head of the Holy One. . . . But what need to tell of its spiritual wonders and of its mystery, the heart of which it is given to every suffering man to pluck out according to his own soul’s needs? It was a little tragedy that to poor Félise the Cathedral symbolised nothing but an overwhelming tyranny. She hated every stone of it, as much as she hated every shiny plank and every polished chair in her aunt’s frigid salon. Even the streets of Chartres repelled her by their bleakness. They lacked the smiling homeliness of Brantôme; and the whole place was flatter than the Sahara. She sighed for the rocks and hills of Périgord.
She also ate the unaccustomed bread of idleness. Had her aunt permitted, she would delightedly have helped with the house-work. But Madame Robineau, widow of a dealer in grain who, before his death, had retired on a comfortable fortune, lived, according to her lights, at her ease, her wants being scrupulously administered to by a cook and a maid. There was no place in the domestic machine for Félise. Her aunt passed long chilly hours over ecclesiastical embroidery, sitting bolt upright in her chair with achaufferettebeneath her feet. Félise, unaccustomed needlewoman, passed longer and chillier hours (having nochaufferette) either playing with a grey ascetic cat or reading aloudLa Croix, the only newspaper allowed to cross the threshold of the house. Now and again, Madame Robineau would drop her thin hands into her lap and regard her disapprovingly. One day she said, interrupting the reading,
“My poor child, how your education has been neglected. You scarcely know how to hold a needle, you can’t read aloud without making faults, and you are ignorant of the elements of our holy religion.”
“My Aunt,” Félise replied, “I know how to manage an hotel.”
“That would be of little use to your husband.”
Félise winced at the unhappy word.
“I am never going to marry,ma tante,” she said.
“You surely do not expect to be admitted into a convent?”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Félise.
“Heaven would forbid,” said Madame Robineau severely, “seeing that you have not the vocation. But thejeune fille bien élevée”—in the mouth of her Aunt Clothilde the familiar phrase assumed a detestable significance, implying, to Félise’s mind, a pallid young creature from whom all blood and laughter had been driven by undesirable virtues—“thejeune fille bien élevéehas only two careers offered to her—the convent or marriage. For you, my dear child, it is marriage.”
“Well,” said Félise, with a smile, preparing, to resume the article in the newspaper over which she had stumbled, “perhaps the beautiful prince will come along one of these days.”
But Madame Robineau rebuked her for vain imaginings.
“It is true, what I said, that your education has been neglected. A young girl’s duty is not to look for princes, but to accept the husband chosen by the wisdom of her family.”
“Ma tante,” said Félise demurely, after a pause during which her aunt took up her work again. “If you would teach me how to embroider, perhaps I might learn to be useful in my future home.”
From this and many other conversations, Félise began to be aware of the subtle strategy of Bigourdin. On the plea of providing her with pro-maternal consolation, he had delivered her into the hands of the enemy. This became abundantly clear as the days went on. Aunt Clothilde, incited thereto by her uncle, was opening a deadly campaign in favour of Lucien Viriot. Now, the cathedral, though paralysing, could be borne for a season, and so could the blight that pervaded the house; but the campaign was intolerable. If she could have resented the action of one so beloved as Bigourdin, she would have resented his sending her to her Aunt Clothilde. Under the chaperonage of the respectable Madame Chauvet she had fallen into a pretty trap. She had found none of the promised sympathy. Aunt Clothilde, although receiving her with the affectionate hospitality due to a sister’s child, had from the first interview frozen the genial current of her little soul. The great bronze cross in itself repelled her. If it had been a nice, gentle little cross, rising and falling on a motherly bosom, it would have worked its all-human, adorable influence. But this was a harsh, aggressive, come-and-be-crucified sort of cross, with no suggestion of pity or understanding. The sallow, austere face above it might have easily been twisted into such a cross. It conveyed no invitation to the sufferer to pour out her troubles. Uncle Bigourdin was wrong again. Rather would Félise have poured out her troubles into the portentous ear of the Suisse at the Cathedral.
Her aunt and herself met nowhere on common ground. They were for ever at variance. Madame Robineau spoke disparagingly of the English, because they were Protestants and therefore heretics.
“But I am English, and I am not a heretic,” cried Félise.
“You are not English,” replied her aunt, “because you have a French mother and have been brought up in France. And as for not being a heretic, I am not so sure. Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup thinks you must have been brought up among Freemasons.”
“Ah non, par exemple!” exclaimed Félise indignantly. For, in the eyes of the Church, French Freemasons are dreadful folk, capable of anything sacrilegious, from denying the miracle of Saint Januarius to slitting the Pope’s weasand. So—“Ah! non par exemple!” cried Félise.
Freemasons, indeed! Her Uncle Gaspard, it is true, did not attend church regularly—but yes, he did attend regularly—he went once a year, every Easter Sunday, and he was the best of friends with Monsieur le Curé of their Paroisse. And as for herself, Monsieur le Curé, who looked like a venerable saint in the holy pictures, had always a smile and ama chère enfantfor her whenever they met. She was on excellent terms with Monsieur le Curé; he would no more have dreamed of associating her with Freemasons than of accusing her of being in league with devils.
He was a good, common-sensical old curé, like thousands of the secular clergy in France, and knew how to leave well alone. Questioned by the ecclesiastically environed Abbé Duloup as to the spiritual state of Félise, he would indubitably have answered with serene conviction:—
“If a soul so pure and so candid, which I have watched from childhood, is not acceptable to thebon Dieu, then I know no more about thebon Dieuthan I know about the Emperor of Patagonia.”
But Félise, disliking the Abbé Duloup and many of his works, felt a delicacy in dragging her own curé into the argument and contented herself with protesting against the charge of heresy. As a matter of fact, she proclaimed her Uncle Gaspard was not a Freemason. He held in abhorrence all secret political societies as being subversive of the State. No one should attack her Uncle Gaspard, although he had betrayed her so shabbily.
In vain she sought some link with her aunt. Even Mimi, the lean old cat, did not form a bond of union. As a vagrant kitten it had been welcomed years ago by the late good-natured Robineau, and the widow tolerated its continued presence with Christian resignation. Félise took the unloved beast to her heart. From Aunt Clothilde’s caustic remarks she gathered that her four cousins, of whose exemplary acceptance of husbands she had heard so much, had eyed Mimi with the coldness of their mother. She began to thank Providence that she did not resemble her cousins, which was reprehensible; and now and then manifested a lack of interest in their impeccable doings, which was more reprehensible still, and thus stirred up against her the maternal instincts of Madame Robineau.
Relations grew strained. Aunt Clothilde spoke to her with sharp impatience. From her recalcitrance in the matter of Lucien she deduced every fault conceivable. For the first time in her life Félise dwelt in an atmosphere where love was not. She longed for home. She longed especially for her father and his wise tenderness. Because she longed so greatly she could not write to him as a father should be written to; and the many-paged letters into which, at night, she put all her aching little heart, in the morning she blushed at the thought of sending. In spite of his lapse from grace she could not be so disloyal to the beloved Uncle Gaspard. Nor could she distress her suffering angel mother by her incoherent account of things. If only she could see her!
At last, one dreary afternoon, Madame Robineau opened an attack in force.
“Put down that cat. I have to talk to you.”
Félise obeyed and Aunt Clothilde talked. The more she talked, the more stubborn front did Félise oppose. Madame Robineau lost her temper. Her thin lips twitched.
“I order you,” she said, “to marry Lucien Viriot.”
“I am sorry to say anything to vex you,ma tante,” replied Félise valiantly; “but you have not the power.”
“And I suppose your uncle has not the power to command you?”
“In matters like that, no,ma tante,” said Félise.
Aunt Clothilde rose from her straight-backed chair and shook a long, threatening finger. The nail at the end was also long and not very clean. Félise often wondered whether her aunt abhorred a nail-brush by way of mortification.
“When one considers all the benefits my brother has heaped on your head,” she cried in a rasping voice, “you are nothing else than a little monster of ingratitude!”
Félise flared up. She did not lack spirit.
“It is false,” she cried. “I adore my Uncle Gaspard. I would give him my life. I am not ungrateful. It is worse than false.”
“It is true,” retorted Madame Robineau. “Otherwise you would not refuse him the desire of his heart. Without him you would have not a rag to your back, or a shoe to your foot, and no more religion than a heathen. It is to him you owe everything—everything. Without him you would be in the gutter where he fished you from.”
She ended on a shrill note. Félise, very pale, faced her passionately, with a new light in her mild eyes.
“What do you mean? The gutter? My father——?”
“Bah! Your father! Your vagabond, ne’er-do-weel scamp of a father! He’s a scandal to the family, your father. He should never have been born.”
The girl reeled. It was a foul bludgeon blow. Madame Robineau, with quick realisation of folly, checked further utterance and allowed Félise, white, quivering and vanquished, but carrying her little head fiercely in the air, to retire from the scene with all the honours of war.
Madame Robineau was sorry. She had lost both temper and dignity. Her next confession would be an unpleasant matter. Possibly, however, the Abbé Duloup would understand and guess the provocation. She shrugged her lean shoulders. It was good sometimes for hoity-toity damsels to learn humility. So she sat down again, pursing her lips, and continued her embroidered stole until it was the hour of vespers. Contrary to custom, she did not summon Félise to accompany her to the Cathedral. An hour or two of solitude, she thought, not unkindly, would bring her to a more reasonable frame of mind. She went out alone.
When she returned she found that Félise had left the house.
It was a very scared young person that presented herself at theguichetat the railway station and asked for a second class ticket to Paris. She had never travelled alone in her life before. Even on her rare visits to the metropolis of Périgueux, in whose vast emporium of fashion she clothed herself, she was attended by Euphémie or the chambermaid. She felt lost, a tiny, helpless creature, in the great, high station in which an engine letting off steam produced a bewildering uproar. How much she paid for her ticket, thrifty and practised housekeeper that she was, she did not know. She clutched the change from a hundred franc note which, a present from her uncle before leaving Brantôme, she had preserved intact, and scuttled like a little brown rabbit to the door of thesalle d’attente.
“Le train de Paris? A quatre heures cinquante,” said the official at the door, as though this palpitating adventure were the commonplace of every minute.
“And that will be?” she gasped.
He cocked an eye at the clock. “In half an hour.”
A train was on the point of starting. There was a scuttle for seats. She felt sure it was the Paris train. From it emanated the magic influence of the great city whither she was bound. A questioned porter informed her it was going in the opposite direction. The Paris express left at four-fifty. The train steamed out. It seemed to Félise as though she had lost a friend. She looked round helplessly, and seeing a fat peasant woman sitting on a bench, surrounded by bundles and children, she ran to her side for protection. It is the unknown that frightens. In the Hôtel des Grottes she commanded men with the serenity of a Queen Elizabeth, and as for commercial travellers and other male visitors, she took no more account of them than of the geese that she plucked. And the terrifying Aunt Clothilde had terrified in vain. But here, in this cold, glass-roofed, steel-strutted, screeching, ghostly inferno of a place, with men prowling about like roaring lions seeking probably whom they might devour, conditions were terrifyingly unfamiliar.
Yet she did not care. Under the blasphemous roof of her Aunt Clothilde she could not have remained. For, in verity, blasphemy had been spoken. Her father was loved and honoured by all the world; by her mother, by Uncle Gaspard, by Corinna, by Martin. And she herself—did she not know her father? Was there ever a man like him? The insulting words rang through her brain. She would have confronted terrors a million fold more grisly than these in order to escape from the blasphemer, whom she could never forgive—no, not for all the curés and abbés in Christendom. An intense little soul was that of Félise Fortinbras. It swept her irresistibly out of the unhallowed villa, with a handbag containing a nightgown, a toothbrush and a faded little photograph of her father and mother standing side by side in wedding garb, on the way to the dread, fascinating whirlpool of Paris, where dwelt the worshipped gods of her idolatry. And, as she sat in the comforting lee of the fat and unafraid peasant woman and her bundles and her children, she took herself to task for cowardice.
The journey, under two hours, was but a trifle. Had it been to Brantôme, an all-night affair, she might have had reason for quailing. But to Paris it was practically but a step. . . . The Abbé Duloup spoke of going to Paris as her uncle spoke of going to Périgueux. Yet her heart thudded violently during the interminable half hour. And there was the grim possibility of the appearance of a pursuing Aunt Clothilde. She kept a fearful eye upon the doorway of thesalle d’attente.
At last the train rushed in, and there was clangour of luggage trucks and clamour of raucous voices announcing the train for Paris; and a flow of waiting people, among whom was her neighbour with her varied impedimenta, swept across the lines and scaled the heights of the carriages. By luck, in front of Félise loomed a compartment showing second class on the door panel and “Dames seules” on the window. She clambered in and sank into a seat. Who her lonely lady fellow-travellers were she could not afterwards remember; for she kept her eyes closed, absorbed in the adventure that still lay before her. Yet it was comforting to feel that as long as the train went on she was safe in this feminine sanctuary, free from depredations of marauding males.
Paris. One of the ladies, seeing that she was about to remain in the carriage, jerked the information over a descending shoulder. Félise followed and stood for a moment more confused than ever in the blue glare and ant-hill hurry of the Gare de Montparnasse. A whole town seemed to have emerged from the train and to stream like a rout of refugees flying from disaster, men, women and children, laden with luggage, towards the barrier. Carried along, she arrived there at length, gave up her ticket, and, issuing from the station, found herself in a narrow street, at the end of which, still following the throng, she came to a thundering thoroughfare. Never, in all her imaginings of Paris, had she pictured such a soul-stunning phantasmagoria of flashing light and flashing movement. There were millions of faces passing her by on the pavement, in the illuminated interiors of omnibuses, in the dimmed recesses of taxi-autos, on waggons, on carts, on bicycles; millions in gaily lit cafés; before her dazzled eyes millions seemed to be reflected even in the quivering, lucent air. She stood at the corner of the Place de Rennes and the Boulevard de Montparnasse paralysed with fear, clutching her handbag tight to her side. In that perilous street thousands of thieves must jostle her. She could not move a step, overwhelmed by the immensity of Paris. A good-natured sergent de ville, possibly the father of pretty daughters, noticed her agonised distress. It was not his business to perform unsolicited deeds of knight errantry; but having nothing else to do for the moment, he caught her eye and beamed paternal encouragement. Now a sergent de ville is asergent de ville(recognisable by his uniform) all France over. Félise held Père Chavrol, who exercised that function at Brantôme, in high esteem. This policeman had a fat, dark, grinning, scrubbily-moustached face which resembled that of Père Chavrol. She took her courage and her handbag in both hands.
“Monsieur,” she said, “can you direct me to the Rue Maugrabine?”
He couldn’t. He did not know that street. In whatquartierwas it? Félise was ignorant.
“C’est là où demeure mon père,” she added. “C’est Monsieur Fortinbras. Tout le monde le connaît à Paris.”
But alas! the sergent de ville had never heard of the illustrious Fortinbras: which was strange, seeing that all Brantôme knew him, although he did not live there.
“What then shall I do, Monsieur,” asked Félise, “to get to my father?”
The sergent de ville pushed his képi to the back of his head and cogitated. Then, with uplifted hand, he halted a crawling fiacre. Rue de Maugrabine? Of course the glazed-hatted, muffled-up driver knew it. Somewhere between the Rue de la Roquette and the Avenue de la République. The sergent de ville smiled vaingloriously. It was onlyces vieux collignons, old drivers of fiacres, that knew their Paris, he explained. The chauffeur of a taxi-auto would have been ignorant of the whereabouts of the Arc de Triomphe. He advised her to engage the omniscient cabman. The Rue Maugrabine was infinitely distant, on the other side of the river. Félise suggested that a cab would cost enormously. In Brantôme legends were still current of scandalous exactions levied by Paris cabmen on provincials. The driver twisted his head affably and hoarsely murmured that it would not cost a fortune. Perhaps two francs, two francs fifty, with a littlepourboire. He did not know. The amount would be registered. The sergent de ville pointed out the taximeter.
“Be not afraid, Mademoiselle. Enter. What number?”
“Number 29.”
He opened the door of the stuffy little brougham. Félise held out her hand as she would have held it out to Père Chavrol, and thanked him as though he had preserved her from legions of dragons. The last she saw of him as she drove off was in the act of majestically sweeping back a group of idlers who had halted to witness the touching farewell.
The old cab jolted and swerved through blazing vistas of unimagined thoroughfares; over bridges spanning mysterious stretches of dark waters and connecting looming masses of gigantic buildings; and through more streets garish with light and apparent revelry. Realisation of its glory came with a little sob of joy. She was in Paris, the Wonderland of Paris transcending all her dreams. Brantôme and Chartres seemed afar off. She had the sensation of a butterfly escaping from the chrysalis. She had been a butterfly for ages. What unremembered kind of state had been her grub condition? Thrills of excitement swept her little body. She was throbbingly happy. And at the end of the magic journey she would meet her father, marvel among men, and her mother, the strange, sweet, mystical being, the enchanted princess of her childish visions, the warm, spiritual, all understanding, all embracing woman of her maiden longings.
The streets grew narrower, less important. They were passing through the poor neighbourhood east of the Place de la Bastille. Fairyland suffered a sinister touch. Slight fears again assailed her. Some of the streets appeared dark and suspect. Evil-looking folk haunted the pavements. She wondered, with a catch of the breath, whither she was being driven. At last the cab swung into a street, darker, more suspect, more ill-odoured than any, and stopped before a large open doorway. She peered through the window. Above the door she could just discern the white figures “29” on the blue plaque. Her rosy dreams melted into night, her heart sank. She alighted.
“This is really 29 Rue Maugrabine?”
“Bien sûr, mademoiselle.”
She had forgotten to look at the taximeter, but taking three francs from her purse, she asked the driver if that was enough. He thanked her with raised hat for munificence, and, whipping up his old horse, drove off.
Félise entered a smelly little paved courtyard and gazed about her helplessly. She had imagined such another decent little house as her aunt’s, at which a ring at the front door would ensure immediate admittance. In this extraordinary dank well she felt more lost than ever. Paris was a bewildering mystery. A child emerged from some dark cavern.
“Can you tell me where Monsieur Fortinbras lives?”
The child advised her to ask the concierge, and pointed to the iron bell-pull. Félise rang. The frowsy concierge gave the directions.
“Au quatrième au coin, à gauche.”
Félise entered the corner cavern and came on an evil-smelling stone staircase, lit here and there by naked gas-jets which blackened the walls at intervals. The cold gathered round her heart. On the second landing some noisy, ill-dressed men clattered past her and caused her to shrink back with fear. She mounted the interminable stairs. Here and there an open door revealed a squalid interior. The rosy dream became a nightmare. She had made some horrible blunder. It was impossible that her father should live here. But the concierge had confirmed the address. On the fourth floor she paused; then, as directed, turned down a small, ill-lit passage to the left. On a door facing her at the end, she noticed the gleam of a card. She approached. It bore the printed legend,
“Daniel Fortinbras,
Ancien Avoué de Londres,
Agent de Famille, &c, &c.”
And written in pencil was the direction: “Sonnez, S. V. P.”
The sight reassured and comforted her. Behind this thin barrier dwelt those dearest to her on earth, the dimly remembered saintly mother, the wise and tender father. She forgot the squalor of the environment. It was merely a feature of Paris mighty and inscrutable, so different from Brantôme. She felt a little throb of pride in her daring, in her achievement. Without guidance—ungenerously she took no account of the sergent de ville, the cabman and the concierge—she had travelled from Chartres to this inmost heart of Paris. She had accomplished her stupendous adventure. . . . The card invited her to ring. Above it hung a bit of wood attached in the middle to a length of twine. She pulled and an answering clang was heard from within the apartment. Her whole being vibrated.
After a moment’s waiting, the door was flung open by a coarse, red-faced, slatternly woman standing in a poverty-stricken little vestibule. She looked at the girl with curiously glazed eyes and slightly swayed as she put up a hand to dishevelled hair.
“Vous désirez?”
“Monsieur Fortinbras,” gasped Félise, scared by the abominable apparition.
“Monsieur Fortinbras?” She mimicked the girl’s clear accent.
“Oui, madame,” replied Félise.
Whereupon the woman withered her with a sudden volley of drunken abuse. She knew how Fortinbras occupied himself all day long. She did not complain. But when thegonzessesof therive gauchehad the indecency to come to his house, she would very soon put them across her knee and teach them manners. This is but a paraphrase of what fell upon Félise’s terror-stricken ears. It fell like an avalanche; but it did not last long, for suddenly came a voice well known but pitched in an unfamiliar key of anger:
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
And Fortinbras appeared.
As he caught sight of his daughter’s white face, he clapped his hands to his head and reeled back, horror in his eyes. Then:
“Tais-toi!” he thundered, and seizing the woman masterfully by the arms, he pushed her into some inner room, leaving Félise shaking on the threshold. In a moment or two he re-appeared, caught overcoat and old silk hat from a peg, and motioning Félise back, marched out of his home and slammed the door behind him. Father and daughter were now in the neutral ground at the end of the dim, malodorous passage.
“What in the name of God are you doing here, Félise?”
“I came to see my mother.”
The fleshy, benign face of the man fell into the sags of old age. His lower lip hung loose. His mild blue eyes, lamping out from beneath noble brows, stared agony.
“Your mother?”
“Yes. Where is she?”
He drew a deep breath. “Your mother—well—she is in a nursing home, dear. No one, not even I, can see her.” He took her by the arm and hurried her to the staircase. “Come, come, dear, we must get away from this. You understand. I did not tell you your mother was so ill, for fear of making you unhappy.”
“But that dreadful woman, father?” she cried. And the Alpine flower from which honey is made looked like a poor little frost-bitten lily of the valley. She faced him on the landing.
“That woman—that——” he waved an arm. “That,” said he, quoting bitterly, “is a woman of no importance.”
“Ah!” cried Félise.
With some of the elemental grossnesses of life she was acquainted. You cannot manage a hotel in France which is a free, non-Puritanical country, and remain in imbecile ignorance. She was shocked to the depths of her being.
“Come,” said Fortinbras with outstretched hand. But she shrank from him. “Come!” he commanded. “There’s no time to lose. We must get out of this.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To the Gare de Montparnasse. You must return at once to Chartres.”
“I will never enter the house of Aunt Clothilde again,” said Félise.
“But what has happened? My God! what has happened?” he asked, as they hurried down the stairs.
Breathlessly, brokenly, she told him. In the courtyard he paused, put his hand to his head.
“But what can I do with you? My God! what can I do with you in this dreadful city?”
“Isn’t there a hotel in Paris?” she asked, coldly.
He laughed in a mirthless way. “There are many. There are the Ritz and the Meurice and the Elysée Palace. Yes—there are hotels enough!”
“I have plenty of money,” she said.
“No, no, my child,” said he. “Not an hotel. I should go mad. I have an idea. Come.”
They had just reached the evil pavement of the Rue Maugrabine, when Cécile Fortinbras, sister of the excellent Gaspard Bigourdin and the pious Clothilde Robineau, and mother of Félise, recovered from the stupor to which the unprecedented fury of her husband had reduced her, and reeled drunkenly to the flat door.
“Je vais arracher les yeux à cette putain-là!”
She started to tear the hussy’s eyes out; but by the time she had accomplished the difficult descent and had expounded her grievances to an unsympathetic concierge, a motor omnibus was conveying father and daughter silent and anguished to the other side of the River Seine.
CHAPTER XII
THEhuge door on the Boulevard Saint Germain swung open at Fortinbras’s ring and admitted them to a warm, marble-floored vestibule adorned with rugs, palms and a cast or two of statuary. Facing them, in its cage of handsome wrought iron-work, stood the lift. All indicated a life so far apart from that of the Rue Maugrabine that Félise, in spite of the despair and disillusion that benumbed her soul, uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“Who lives here?”
“Lucilla Merriton, an American girl. Pray God she is in,” replied Fortinbras, opening the lift gate. “We can but see.”
He pressed the second-floor button and the lift shot up. On the landing were the same tokens of luxury. A neat maid answered the door. Mademoiselle Merriton was at home, but she had just begun dinner. Fortinbras drew a card from a shabby pocketbook.
“Tell Mademoiselle that the matter is urgent.”
The maid retired, leaving them in a small lobby beyond which was a hall lit by cunningly subdued lights, and containing (to Félise’s unsophisticated vision) a museum of costly and beautiful objects. Strange skins of beasts lay on the polished floor, old Spanish chests in glowing crimson girt with steel, queer chairs with straight, tall backs, such as she had seen in the sacristies of old churches in the Dordogne, and richly carved tables were ranged against the walls, and above them hung paintings of old masters, such as she was wont to call “holy pictures,” in gilt frames. From the soft mystery of a corner gleamed a marble copy of the Venus de’ Medici, which, from Félise’s point of view, was not holy at all. Yet the sense of beauty and comfort pervading the place, appealed to her senses. She stood on the threshold looking round wonderingly, when a door opened, and, in a sudden shaft of light, appeared a tall, slim figure which advanced with outstretched hand. Félise shrank behind her father.
“Why, Fortinbras, what good wind has brought you?” The lady spoke in a rich and somewhat lazy contralto. “Excuse that celestial idiot of a Céleste for leaving you standing here in the cold. Come right in.”
She led the way into the hall, and then became aware of Félise and flashed a glance of enquiry.
“This is my little daughter, Lucilla.”
“Why? Not Félise?” she gave her both hands in a graceful gesture. “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve heard all about you from Corinna Hastings. I put her up for the night on her way back to London, you know. Now why”—still holding Félise’s hands—“have you kept her from us all this time, Fortinbras? I don’t like you at all.”
“Paris,” said Fortinbras, “isn’t good for little girls who live in the heart of France.”
“But surely the heart of France is Paris!” cried Lucilla Merriton.
“Paris, my dear Lucilla,” replied Fortinbras gravely, “may be the liver, the spleen, the pancreas—whatever giblets you please of France; but it is not its heart.”
Lucilla laughed; and when she laughed she had a way of throwing up her head which accentuated the graceful setting of her neck. Her thick brown hair brushed back, ever so little suggestive of the Pompadour, from her straight forehead, aided the unconscious charm of the habit.
“We won’t argue the point. You’ve brought Félise here because you want me to look after her. How did I guess? My dear man, I’ve lived twenty-seven years in this ingenuous universe. How babes unborn don’t spot its transparent simplicity I never could imagine. You haven’t dined.”
“I have,” said Fortinbras, “but Félise hasn’t.”
“You shall dine again. It’s the first time you have condescended to visit me, and I exact the penalty.”
She went to the open door whence she had issued.
“Céleste!”—the maid appeared—“Monsieur and Mademoiselle are dining with me and Mademoiselle is staying the night. See she has all she wants.Allez vite.Go, my dear, with Céleste, and be quick, for dinner’s getting cold.”
And when Félise, subdued by her charming masterfulness, had retired in the wake of the maid, Miss Merriton turned on Fortinbras.
“Now, what’s the trouble?”
In a few words he told her what was meet for a stranger to know.
“So she ran away and came to you for protection and you can’t put her up? Is that right?”
“The perch of an old vulture like myself,” said he, “is no fit place for my daughter.”
Lucilla nodded. “That’s all right. But, say—you don’t approve of this mediæval sort of marriage business, do you?”
“I retain my English views. I shall explain them to my brother-in-law and forbid the alliance. Besides, the excellent Bigourdin is the last man in the world to force her into a distasteful marriage. Reassure her on that point. She can go back to Brantôme with a quiet mind.”
“Will you remain in Paris with a mind equally serene?” Lucilla asked, her deep grey eyes examining his face, which he had vainly endeavoured to compose into its habitual aspect of detached benevolence. He met her glance.
“The derelict,” said he, “is a thing of no account. But it is better that it should not lie in the course of the young and living ship.”
Lucilla put her hands behind her back and sat on the corner of an old Venetian table. And she still looked at him, profoundly interested. Here was a Fortinbras she had never met before, a broken man, far removed from the shrewd and unctuousmarchand de bonheurof the Latin Quarter with his rolling periods and opportunist philosophy.
“There’s something behind all this,” she remarked. “If I’m to be any good, I ought to know.”
He recovered a little and smiled. “Your perspicacity does credit to your country,” said he. “Also to your sex. There is much behind it. An unbridgeable gulf of human sorrow. Remember that, should my little girl be led away—which I very much doubt—to talk to you of most unhappy things. She only came to the edge of the gulf half an hour ago. The marriage matter is but a thistledown of care.”
“I more or less see,” said Lucilla. “The vulture’s perch overhangs the gulf. Right. Now what do you want me to do?”
“Just keep her until I can find a way to send her back to Brantôme.”
Lucilla raised a hand, and reflected for a few seconds. Then she said: “I’ll run her down there myself in the car.”
“That is most kind of you,” replied Fortinbras, “but Brantôme is not Versailles. It is nearly three hundred miles away.”
“Well? What of that? I suppose I can commandeer enough gasoline in France to take me three hundred miles. Besides, I am due the end of next week, anyway, to stay with some friends at Cap Martin, before going to Egypt. I’ll start a day or two earlier and drop Félise on my way. Will that suit you?”
“But, again, Brantôme is not on your direct route to Monte Carlo,” he objected.
She slid to her feet and laughed. “Do you want me to be a young mother to your little girl, or don’t you?”
“I do,” said he.
“Then don’t conjure up lions in the path. See here,” she touched his sleeve. “You were a good friend to me once when I had that poor little fool Effie James on my hands—I shouldn’t have pulled her through without you—and you wouldn’t accept more than your ridiculous fee—and now I’ve got a chance of shewing you how much I appreciate what you did. I don’t know what the trouble is, and now I don’t want to know. But you’re my friend, and so is your daughter.”
Fortinbras smiled sadly. “It is you that are themarchand de bonheur. You remove an awful load from my mind.” He took his old silk hat from the console where he had deposited it, and held out his hand. “The old vulture won’t stop to dinner. He must be flying. Give my love, my devoted love to Félise.”
And with an abruptness which she could not reconcile with his usual suave formality of manner, he turned swiftly and walked through the lobby and disappeared. His leave-taking almost resembled the flight he spoke of.
The wealthy, comely, even-balanced American girl looked blankly at the flat door and wondered, conscious of tragedy. What was the gulf of which he spoke? She knew little about the man. . . . Two years before a girl from Cheyenne, Wyoming, who had brought her letters of introduction, came to terrible grief. There was blackmail at her throat. Somebody suggested Fortinbras as counsellor. She, Lucilla, consulted him. He succeeded in sending a damsel foolish, reprehensible and frightened, but intact in reputation and pocket, back to her friends in Cheyenne. His fees for so doing amounted to twenty francs. For two years therefore, she had passed the time of day friendliwise with Fortinbras whenever she met him; but until her fellow-student, Corinna Hastings, sought her hospitality on the way back to England, and told her of Brantôme and Félise, she had regarded him merely as one of the strange, sweet monsters, devoid of domestic attributes, even of a private life, that Paris, city of portents and prodigies, had a monopoly in producing. . . . And now she had come upon just a flabby, elderly man, piteously anxious to avert some sordid misery from his own flesh and blood. She sighed, turned and saw Félise in charge of Céleste.
“Come, you must be famished.” She put her arm round the girl’s waist and led her into the dining-room. “Your father couldn’t stay. But he told me to give you his love and to regard myself as a sort of young mother to you.”
Félise murmured a shy acknowledgement. She was too much dazed for coherent thoughts or speech. The discovery of the conditions in which her father lived, and the sudden withering of her faith in him, had almost immediately been followed by her transference into this warm wonder-house of luxury owned and ruled by this queenly young woman, so exquisite in her simple marvel of a dress. The soft lights, the pictures, the elusive reflections from polished wood, the gleam of heavy silver and cut glass, the bowl of orchids on the table, the delicate napery—she had never dreamed of such though she held herself to be a judge of table-linen—the hundred adjuncts of a wealthy woman’s dining room, all filled her with a sense of the unreal, and at the same time raised her poor fallen father in her estimation by investing him with the character of a magician. Dainty food was placed before her, but she could scarcely eat. Lucilla, to put her more at her ease, talked of Corinna and of Brantôme which she was dying to visit and of the quaint Englishman, she had forgotten his name, who had become a waiter. How was he getting on?
“Monsieur Martin? Very well, thank you.”
She put down the glass of wine which she was about to raise to her lips. For nearly an hour she had not thought of Martin. She felt sundered from him by many seas and continents. Since seeing him through what scorching adventures had she not passed? She had changed. The world had changed. Nothing would ever be the same again. Tears came into her eyes. Lucilla, observing them, smiled.
“You like Monsieur Martin?”
“Everybody likes him; he is so gentle,” said Félise.
“But is that what women look for in a man?” asked Lucilla. “Doesn’t she want some one strong to lean on? Something to appeal to the imagination? Something morepanache?”
Félise thought of Lucien Viriot and his cavalry plume and shivered. No. She did not wantpanache. Martin’s quiet, simple ways, she knew not why, were worth all the clanking of all the sabres in the world put together.
“That depends on temperament, mademoiselle,” said Félise, in French.
Lucilla laughingly exclaimed: “You dear little mouse. I suppose a tom-cat frightens you to death.”
But Félise was only listening with her outer ears. “I am very fond of cats,” she replied simply.
Whereupon Lucilla laughed again with quick understanding.
“I have a half-grown Persian kitten,” she said, “rather a beauty. Céleste,apportez-moi le shah de Perse. That’s my little joke.”
“C’est un calembour,” said Félise, with a smile.
“Of course it is. It’s real smart of you to see it. I call him Padishah.”
Céleste brought a grey woolly mass of felinity from a basket in a dim corner and handed it to Félise. The beast purred and stretched contentedly in her arms.
“Oh, what a dear!” she cried. “What a fluffy little dear! For the last week or two,” she found herself saying, “my only friend has been a cat.”
“What kind of a cat?” asked Lucilla.
“Oh, not one like this. It was a thin old tabby.” And under the influence of the soft baby thing on her bosom and the kind eyes of her young hostess, the shyness melted from her, and she told of Mimi, and Aunt Clothilde, and the abhorred cathedral and the terrors of her flight to Paris.
She had come, more or less, to an end, when Céleste brought in a Pekinese spaniel, and set him down on the hearthrug to a plate of minced raw beef, which he proceeded to devour with lightning gluttony. Having licked the polished plate from hearthrug to clattering parquet and licked it underneath in the hope of a grain of nourishment having melted through, he arched his tail above his back and composing his miniature leonine features, regarded his mistress with his soul in his eyes, as who should say: “Now, having tasted, when shall I truly dine?” But Lucilla sent him to his chair, where he assumed an attitude of polite surprise; and she explained to Félise, captivated by his doggy winsomeness, that she called him “Gaby,” which was short for Heliogabalus, the voluptuary; which allusion Félise, not being familiar with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, did not understand. But, when Lucilla, breaking through rules of discipline, caught up the tawny little aristocrat and apostrophized him as “the noseless blunder,” Félise laughed heartily, thinking it very funny, and, holding the kitten in her left arm, took him from Lucilla with her right, and covered the tiny hedonist with caresses.
When the meal was over, Lucilla took her, still embracing kitten and dog, into the studio—the wealthy feminine amateur’s studio—a room with polished floors and costly rugs and divans and tapestries and an easel or two and a great wood fire blazing up an imitation Renaissance chimney-piece. And Lucilla talked not only as though she had known Félise all her life, but as though Félise was the most fascinating little girl she had ever met. And it was all more Wonderland for Félise. And so it continued during the short evening; for Lucilla, seeing that she was tired, ordered the removal to their respective padded baskets of dog and cat, both of which Félise had retained in her embrace, and sent her to bed early; and it continued during the process of undressing amid the beautiful trifles wherewith she performed her toilette; and after she had put on the filmy, gossamer garment adorned with embroidered miracles that Céleste had laid out for her; and after she had sunk asleep in the fragrant linen of the warm nest. But in the middle of the night she awoke and saw the face of the dreadful woman in the Rue Maugrabine and heard the voice of her Aunt Clothilde speaking blasphemy against her father, and then she upbraided herself for being led away by the enchantment of the Wonder-house, and breaking down, sobbed for her lost illusions until the dawn.
In the meanwhile a heart-broken man sat in a sordid room toiling dully at the task of translating French commercial papers into English, by which means he added a little to his precarious income, while on the other side of the partition his wife slept drunkenly. That had been his domestic life, good God! he reflected, for more years than he cared to number. But up to then Félise had been kept in ignorance. Now the veil had been lifted. She had, indeed, retained the mother of her dreams, but at what a cost to him! Would it not have been better to tell her the truth? He stared at the type-written words until they were hidden by a mist of tears. He had lost all that made life sweet for him—the love of Félise.
He bowed his head in his hands. Judgment had at last descended on him for the sins of his youth; for he had erred grievously. All the misery he had endured since then had been but a preparation for the blow that had now fallen. It would be easy to go to her to-morrow and say: “I deceived you last night. The woman you saw was your mother.” But he knew he would never be able to say it. He must pay the great penalty.
He paid it the next day when he called humbly to see her. She received him dutifully and gave him her cheek to kiss, but he felt her shrink from him and read the anguished condemnation in her eyes. He saw, too, for he was quick at such things, how her glance took in, for the first time in her life, his worn black clothes, his frayed linen, his genteel shabbiness, a grotesque contrast to the air of wealth in which she found herself. And he knew that she had no mean thoughts but was pierced to the heart by the discovery; for she turned her head aside and bit her lip, so that he should not guess.
“I should like to tell you what I have done,” said he, after some desultory and embarrassed talk about Lucilla. “I have telegraphed to Chartres and Brantôme to say that you are safe and sound, and I have written to your Uncle Gaspard about Lucien Viriot. You will never hear of the matter again, unless your Aunt Clothilde goes to Brantôme, which I very much doubt.”
“Thank you, father,” said Félise, and the commonplace words sounded cold in her ears. She was delivered, she knew, from the nightmare of the past few weeks; but she found little joy in her freedom. Then she asked:
“Have you told Uncle Gaspard why I ran away from Aunt Clothilde?”
“Enough, dear, for him to understand. He will ask you no questions, so you needn’t tell him anything.”
“Won’t that be ungrateful? I have treated him ungratefully enough already.”
Fortinbras stretched out his hand to lay it caressingly on her head, as he had done all her life, but, remembering, withdrew it, with a sigh.
“Your uncle is the best and truest man I have ever met,” said he. “And he loves you dearly and you love him—and with love ingratitude can’t exist. Tell him whatever you find in your heart. But there is one thing you need never tell him—what you saw in the Rue Maugrabine last night. I have done so already. In this way there will be nothing secret between you.”
She sat with tense young face, looking at her hands. Again she saw the squalid virago. She would see her till her dying day. To no one on earth could she speak of her.
Fortinbras rose, kissed her on the forehead and went forth to his day’s work of dealing out happiness to a clamouring world.